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World's Shortest P2P App: 15 Lines
soren.harward writes "The New Scientist has an article about TinyP2P, the world's smallest P2P app. It's 15 lines of Python code brought to us by Edward Felten, CS Professor at Princeton and outspoken supporter of the digital rights the Slashdot community holds so dear. He wrote the program as a proof-of-concept that P2P apps are really easy to write, don't have to be complicated, and thus banning them (a la the INDUCE Act) is pointless and silly."
The 15 line P2P has been mentioned before by Slashdot - but the New Scientist article wasn't mentioned last time (as it hadn't yet been written).
The last article also mentioned the 9 line Molestar written in Perl - which is now 6 lines.
dupe checker for slashdot
10 wget http://localhost/warez/\* 20 pause 10 30 goto 10
Lines cannot be longer than 80 chars - it's the law :)
heres some +5 comments for your viewing pleasure!
t k-gnutella/gtk-gnutella-0.92.1c.tar.gz`;
;) http://www.perlmonks.org/index.pl?node=golf [perlmonks.org]
The point is that a person/entity can create a P2P program with a very small amount of custom code. If someone is going to ban P2P for "inducing" copyright infringement, they'd look stupid for banning a program this small or they'd have to ban the libraries that are used too which is pretty unlikely.
A p2p app is pretty pointless without a network stack but no one counts that as part of the app or supporting code. Don't pick the nits too much.
Umm, you're missing the point. The fact is with commonly available tools, and I'd consider Perl and Python (or Java) with their massive stock libraries "commonly available", one can easily write a p2p app (heck, BitTorrent is written in Python, so I think it's a very valid example).
Hell, by your logic, the following application:
int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
printf("Hello World");
}
is cheating, since I'm using printf, and god knows how complicated that call is, not to mention all the code in the OS to make the text appear on stdout!
Those are both cheating.
Okay, here's p2p in two lines of perl:
#!/usr/bin/perl
`wget http://www.filefront.com/?filepath=/gnutelliums/g
It also uses files, which is totally cheating. Without fi.write(), this guy would have to do a lot more work to have the computer convert a virtual address into the a device real address and accessing the filesystem implementation specific rules to carry out the necessary data and metadata operations to complete the task. And thats just the half of it.
Do Perl developers have some kind of reverse size-compensation complex?
Anything you can do I can do smaller?
It's commonly referred to as "golf".
I have just created a zero line P2P program which I have entitled "Walking to the Neighbor's House to Borrow a Movie".
I could be evil and patent it, but I have decided to release it under the GPL.
I have discovered a truly marvelous demonstration of P2P that this margin is too narrow to contain.
--Fermat's Second-to-Last Conjecture
I've added some new features to your wonderful program, which I too am releasing under the GPL. I call it:
"Breaking in to the Neighbor's House to steal a Movie".
Oh yeah, I got it in 2 lines of shell: (Score:5, Funny)
by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 15, @01:10PM (#11096822)
#!/bin/bash
### ToDo: Write P2P app here
There goes my argument that Python promotes readable code....
Matthew Scala, a reader of Freedom to Tinker, has responded with the 9 line MoleSter, written in Perl.
There have been discussions recently about potential employers doing a Google search on job applicants, so the way I see it Mr. Scala's either very smart or very stupid.
Very stupid, for the fact a lot of searches will put "Matthew Scala" and "molester" together on the same page.
Very smart, because this tactic will bury any evidence of his pedophilia under a pile of MoleSter links and pages.
=P
--
± 23 dB
In that case, next time you write a hello world program, make sure you write a custom OS with it and don't forget the thousands of drivers you'll need. Sharing or reusing code is a common and necessary practice.
Regards,
Steve
The point isn't how trivial (or not) a complete P2P solution is.
The point is that the DIFFERENCE between a networking application that has nothing to do with P2P and a P2P application is 15 lines. Thus, if you write a law that "bans something that allows peer-to-peer file sharing", you've probably just banned the standard distribution of Python since, being only 15 lines short of being a full P2P app, it pretty much allows peer to peer file sharing.
paintball
Machine language, the bytecode form of assembly language that microprocessors interpret, doesn't really have "lines" either. The point isn't that MoleSter is 6 lines as much as it is 466 bytes, and programming golf rules state that a lower score in bytes is better.
It's easy you can do it now. Just dump the raw hex of the files into a postscript and print. use a photocopier to make as many copies as you like.
then hand them out. end users use OCR and their scanners. reassemble the files by hand.
Warning large files may use lot's of paper.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.